"Whatever it takes.". That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's vow as the worst financial panic in more than 50 years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression. Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition

In this intriguing business novel, which illustrates state-of-the-art economic theory, Alex Rogo is a UniCo plant manager whose factory and marriage are failing. To revitalize the plant, he follows piecemeal advice from an elusive former college professor who teaches, for example, that reduction in the efficiency of some plant operations may make the entire operation more productive. Alex's attempts to find the path to profitability and to engage his employees in the struggle involve the listener; and thankfully the authors' economic models.

Ahmad alqurashie says:"I wish all audiobooks were as good as The Goal"

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

On January 26, 2009, during the depth of the financial crisis and having just completed five years as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy F. Geithner was sworn in by President Barack Obama as the 75th Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Now, in a strikingly candid, riveting, and historically illuminating memoir, Geithner takes listeners behind the scenes during the darkest moments of the crisis.

Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit

Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers.

Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot is a description of the money market, published in 1873. Bagehot was one of the first writers to describe and explain the world of international and corporate finance, banking, and money in understandable language. This book was in part a reaction to the 1866 collapse of Overend, Gurney and Company, located at 65 Lombard Street, from which comes the title.

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System

From the man who was in the very middle of this perfect economic storm, On the Brink is Paulson's fast-paced retelling of the key decisions that had to be made with lightning speed. Paulson puts the listener in the room for all the intense moments as he addressed urgent market conditions, weighed critical decisions, and debated policy and economic considerations with of all the notable players.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire

Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the 17th century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the age of Greenspan, bringing the listener into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned - and Have Still to Learn - from the Financial Crisis

The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis, but the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us about modern economies and economics. The audiobook identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed, there is a little-known story of bad ideas. For 50 years or more, economists have been busy developing elegant theories of how markets work - how they facilitate innovation, wealth creation, and an efficient allocation of society's resources. But what about when markets don't work?

The Greatest Trade Ever: How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized something few others suspected--that the housing market and the value of subprime mortgages were grossly inflated and headed for a major fall. Paulson's background was in mergers and acquisitions, however, and he knew little about real estate or how to wager against housing. He had spent a career as an also-ran on Wall Street. But Paulson was convinced this was his chance to make his mark. He just wasn't sure how to do it....

Wall Street: A History, Updated Edition

Wall Street is an unending source of legend - and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself - from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant - and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world.

The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy

The meeting of world leaders at Bretton Woods in 1944 was the only time countries from around the world agreed to overhaul the structure of the international monetary system. The system they set up presided over the longest, strongest, and most stable period of growth the world economy has ever seen.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

The author of 12 acclaimed books, Robert B. Reich is a Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and has served in three national administrations. While many blamed Wall Street for the financial meltdown, Aftershock points a finger at a national economy in which wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top - and where a grasping middle class simply does not have the resources to remain viable.

Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism

This audiobook offers the first systematic analysis of Putin's two wars, placing the Second Chechen War and the War with Georgia of 2008 in their broader historical contexts. Drawing on extensive original Russian sources, Marcel H. Van Herpen analyzes in detail how Putin's wars were prepared and conducted and why they led to allegations of war crimes and genocide.

The Crash of 2008 and What It Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets

In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros, the legendary financier and philanthropist, has written a significant update to his New York Times best seller, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. The revised and updated edition, The Crash of 2008 and What It Means, contains four new chapters, in which he looks at the depth and breadth of the credit crash and proposes an updated set of policies to confront the global financial crisis.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real-estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his number-one best-selling Liar’s Poker.

Too Big to Fail

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter. Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true, behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece.

Unexpected Economics

Why are we choosing to have fewer children, even as we put more time into raising each one? Why are we so often willing to follow the herd and the opinions of strangers when making important decisions, even when those decisions are deeply personal? Most surprising: Why are questions like these increasingly attracting the attention of economists?

Publisher's Summary

"Whatever it takes."

That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's vow as the worst financial panic in more than 50 years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression.

Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then, when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated.

The president of the United States can respond instantly to a missile attack with America's military might, but he cannot respond to a financial crisis with real money unless Congress acts. The Fed chairman can. Bernanke did. Under his leadership the Fed spearheaded the biggest government intervention in more than half a century and effectively became the fourth branch of government, with no direct accountability to the nation's voters.

Believing that the economic catastrophe of the 1930s was largely the fault of a sluggish and wrongheaded Federal Reserve, Bernanke was determined not to repeat that epic mistake. In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how the Bernanke Fed led the desperate effort to prevent the world's financial engine from grinding to a halt.

What the Critics Say

"David Wessel brings his deep knowledge of the Federal Reserve and U.S. politics and economics to a topic that will be studied by historians for decades to come....No one can understand what happened and what did not happen without reading this book." (Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of Globalization and its Discontents)

It is a well-researched book giving the Fed's side of the story of how the present financial crisis developed and was managed. A must-read for those interested in politics and policy of money, inflation, financial markets and financial stability, to be read together with Charles Morris' 'The two trillion dollar meltdown' (which gives a market side of the things). Taking of the Fed perspective to describe the crisis is in itself unique and certainly worth a praise - it rightly focuses on the central bank as a the main nerve in crisis management, while demystifying its workings and providing a lot of colorful inside detail. Yet a few criticisms can be made. First, the book tries to be three things at once: a primer on the Fed's history and functions, a journalistic recounting of how the Fed behaved in the crisis since August 2007 and a biographical background to a few key players - Ben Bernanke and his closest lieutenants. The way those three streams are mixed sometimes seems a bit too arbitrary - I imagine heavily indexing the print copy of the book to be able to fully recover the three intertwined stories. Also: having an European background I noticed the author is rather loose on covering the interaction between the European Central Bank and the Fed in the crisis - which should in fact be a fourth major story line. Clearly, the author simply avoided a topic on which he felt less strong to write but the effect is of major underestimation of the co-operation effort that the present financial crisis enforced between central bankers and governments across the globe.

This book is rich in the history of events and background characters. Glad I read it but was left feeling that there should have been more depth and analysis into the meaning of it all and the implications for our economy. Certainly mentioned possible conflict in interests for some of the players but didn't deal with the implications of those conflicts. Didn't do much to explore the legitimacy of Shiela Bair's desire to preserve the integrity of the FDIC and seemed to give a heroic quality to the "whatever it takes" approach to rewriting the rule book on the fly. So what if the next Fed chairman is less agile or innovative? What about a government of laws?

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The author was trying to be unbiased but did not do very well. It did provide great background and insight to the activities surrounding the crisis, and in that regard was very worth listening to. However, It fell short on analysis of the specific plans the FED enacted and their conseqeunces.

Would you be willing to try another book from David Wessel? Why or why not?

This audio book is well worth your time investment. As a reader I become drawn into all the action of the House, Senate, Whitehouse, Federal Finance, plus all other governmental folks that kept the economy moving during the many financial panics over several years; (so many monetary inter-dependencies). Takes a special economist to perform these economy saving jobs! No place for amateurs here... (Job seems to require keeping one's composure at all times, offer best money movement recommendations during times of financial panic).

Nothing short of wow after wow to keep the money moving; (whatever it takes). You may learn much about acting wise / (economy history educated) during times of high economic stress; as you listen to this audio book.

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